‘Tablet’ gadgets aim to fill gap

February 22, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — If you’ve got a car and a bicycle, do you need a motorcycle, too? Wireless carriers are betting that you do. They’re making a big push this year for the motorcycles of the gadget world: devices that are bigger than a phone but smaller than a laptop.

The most famous entrant in the category is Apple Inc.’s iPad, which comes out next month. But many other manufacturers are crowding into the niche, and were planning to do so even before Apple’s announcement in January.

Some of them are making keyboard-less “tablet” computers in the vein of the iPad. Others are making small laptoplike things known as “smartbooks” that will sell for a few hundred dollars.

Hewlett-Packard Co. showed its first smartbook last week in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress, the world’s largest cell-phone trade show. At first glance, HP’s Compaq AirLife 100 looks just like a netbook — a small laptop — but the inner workings are quite different.

Rather than using Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software, the smartbook runs Android, which Google Inc. created for mobile devices and gives away for free. Rather than using a computer processor from Intel Corp. or Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the AirLife uses a chip from Qualcomm Inc. that has cell phone heritage.

The AirLife works somewhat like a cell phone as well: It’s ready to use as soon as you flip the lid open. Like a phone, it receives your e-mail even when it’s in standby mode with the lid closed. Because the Qualcomm chip uses a lot less power than a PC chip, HP says the AirLife can be used for 12 hours between charging.

Smartbooks are like cell phones in another way: Wireless carriers will sell them. Spain’s Telefonica will sell the AirLife in Europe and Latin America sometime this spring. There are no plans for a U.S. launch, but HP competitor Lenovo Group has revealed a very similar device, the Skylight, which AT&T Inc. will carry in the U.S. (AT&T will also provide wireless broadband service for the iPad.)

The carriers will sell smartbooks because the devices have built-in modems for Internet access on cellular networks. That means they’ll usually come with a monthly service fee, in exchange for which carriers will subsidize the purchase prices, perhaps in the $200 to $400 range. (AT&T and Telefonica have not announced their prices yet.)

Dell Inc. is using the same technology — Android software running on a Qualcomm chip — for a tablet computer with a touch screen that is 5 inches on the diagonal. An iPhone screen is 3.5 inches, so the Mini 5 is reminiscent of a big iPhone. It’s set to be released in the U.S. later this year.

Chip maker Nvidia Corp. brought six tablets and two smartbooks running its chips. They’re made by Asian manufacturers that are largely unknown to the public, and the idea is that they’ll be sold by wireless carriers, said spokesman Shawn Adamek.

The world’s largest maker of PC processors, Intel Corp., doesn’t want to be left out of the new market, either. It has talked for a few years about getting its chips into “mobile Internet devices,” and that ambition seems to be coming to fruition.